Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Install OpenBabel in Fedora 16 to convert chemical file formats

OpenBabel is a software that has been widely used by computational chemist. Usually the structure of any compound are drawn using mainly ChemDraw and ACD ChemSketch  softwares and default file format are .cdx and .sk2, respectively. But for the computational study the required file format are; .mol2 or .pdb etc. OpenBabel can convert as pr required.

People who are lazy in typing may become tired in typing "babel [-i (input-type)] (name) [-o (output-type)] (name)" many times to convert the individual files. They may seek to install the graphical version of OpenBabel by the command "cmake ./openbabel-2.x.x -DBUILD_GUI=ON" but thay may face a lot of difficulties in many Linux Distros such as to install wxWidget.

As I have been mentioning Fedora, a kind of Linux operating, is the leader NOT a follower, many latest Linux software repository can be acquired easily in Fedora through yum. Similarly it is very easy to install OpenBabel in Fedora 15 and 16.

  1. Become root by typing su and then your root password.
  2. Type yum install openbabel-gui
  3. wait and then press y.
It will be installed within 10-15 minutes and enjoy.

1 comment:

  1. The project's stated goal is: "Open Babel is a community-driven scientific project assisting both users and developers as a cross-platform program and library designed to support molecular modeling, chemistry, and many related areas, including interconversion of file formats and data."

    Thanks
    Michael
    legacy computer

    ReplyDelete